We can use GPS data to fight coronavirus and other epidemics

To facilitate the ongoing efforts and to help companies and scientists, I built a tool just for that.

The principle behind the analysis is simple: If we know who is infected and if we know their movements in the previous few days, we can identify the others who crossed paths with them!

However, there are some aspects that we have to consider. For example, not every encounter is equally risky. Multiple and lengthy encounters in a relatively close proximity with the infected individuals are not as same as e.g. just driving by them. This tool considers all of these factors and returns the score which represents the overall risk for the exposed people. It also reports the latitude and the longitude of the critical encounters, as well as the duration of the encounters.

In the future a tool like this can be useful for planning the healthcare capacities in a short-term. By tracking the past movements of the infected individuals and by cross-referencing with the movements of other people, we can detect the most contagious areas and optimize the healthcare capacities. This is just one example of it’s potential applications.

The tool is still in an early development phase and the main population I had in mind are the researchers. I invite everybody to contribute to the development. We can built an open-source package for handling the users location data in the times of epidemics.

The governments could potentially make a use of this approach. It necessary brings up the questions of trade-offs between the privacy and national interests, as there are “growing concerns about the ways in which big tech companies track their users”. How many people are willing to surrender a piece of their privacy (the movement data) so the future potential pandemics could be stopped and thousands lives saved?

The code is open and everyone is invited to contribute:

Contact: gmuric@isi.edu

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